La Paz, Boliva

Arrived in La Paz relatively exhausted last night after sucking diesel fumes in the back row of a bathroom-less bus for about six hours. At one point I looked out the window at a little four-door compact driving next to us and marvelled at the fact that we were on a one-way highway, wondering where the west-bound lanes were. After a couple minutes of this, with the bus and the car jockeying for position around several blind turns on a steep mountain road, I realized we absolutely were *not* on a one-way road and that both drivers were absolute psychopaths.

The trip included a "ferry" across Lake Titikaka, which essentially consisted of a bunch of wooden pallets tied together operated by a guy with a long pole and a tiny outboard motor. Thankfully, only the bus rode across on the ferry while the people where herded onto a tiny boat which was marginally less terrifying. I´ll post pictures of this thing when I get a chance because it´s really quite unbelievable. Vern Fonk wouldn´t touch this operation with a twenty-foot cattle prod.

Had more fun than we meant to last night, but for the most part La Paz has been a blurry, tired stop. Very much a city, with people going to jobs and buying vacuum cleaners and the like, very big and crowded and busy and strikingly carved into the basin and walls of an enormous natural crater -- kind of like Pittsburgh except bigger and dirtier.

We also accidently wandered into a karaoke bar with a very shady back room and insanely high drink prices, which has me absolutely convinced it was a brothel. There were no English songs in the karaoke book so we didn´t sing anything.